Hello yvan ! nice of you to stop by this joyous chaos...
interesting you should bring up phonetic spelling, although i think that is more concerned with spelling than pronunciation (we started from a comparison of accents...). i'm not sure how i feel about phonetics. i am wary of it, because although some languages (*cough*
french*cough*) can seem very hard to spell, full of arbitrary and nonsensical series of letters, it still did evolve from more ancient versions or other languages and usually there are rules behind the spelling which you can learn, and which help to understand the language better because then you can see relationships between different words, and deduce the meaning of a word you don't know based on parts of it or similarity with words you *do* know ; this is lost with phonetic spelling. also, i am always worried that simplifying the spelling will result in simplifying the language, and as you said, the last thing we would want would be to sacrifice "the beauty and subtlety of style, for expediency of communication." we have to do our best to avoid even more erosion !
but yes, languages do *evolve* constantly, that's why they are called "living languages" and it's a fascinating process. now if only the evolution could *always* be an enrichment, never a reduction...
as for your brother's house...
are you sure it's still there ??? i hope spring comes soon, but not too quick, or his house will be underwater instead !
@ Cthulhu : ô ancient one, why do you want to throw french men ??? is this some sort of weird ancient cephalopod sport ??
@ Taylor : don't put squid in your mouth. aside from resulting in incomprehensible mumbling, you don't know where they've been.